Cisco's Cloud Plan for IoT

Cisco Systems on Monday announced a $1 billion investment in what it calls its Intercloud, a linked chain of datacenters providing services designed to capitalize on the Internet of Things. Cisco has no intention of competing with Amazon Web Services, Google, or Rackspace in supplying general-purpose infrastructure as a set of cloud services. Instead, it has assembled a set of partners to offer a global chain of datacenters linked by a Cisco network to serve as a backbone for the Internet of Things.

"This is not about five public cloud datacenters worldwide," said Favio Gori, director of Cisco cloud marketing, in a description that sounded suspiciously like VMware's vCloud Hybrid Service. Rather, Cisco announced nine partners that will help it build out a set of services on top of OpenStack software to serve as worldwide data-collection points for device data, analytics, and data warehousing.

Gori couldn't put a number on how many datacenters the chain might eventually include, but said it "will leverage Cisco datacenters and those of select partners" to build its chain rapidly. Its own facilities will be combined with those of Australian partner Telstra to put its initial set online in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia "by the end of the year," Gori said in an interview.

I think Cisco systems is trying to capitalize on the provision of Internet of Things, by providing a global chain of datacenters linked by their own network, this is obviously going to affect Google, Amazon Web Services and Rackspace since they are also supplying the same service They should not say that they have no intention of competition.

Indeed every company would like to have their data on their cloud, this will automatically help in analyzing consumer behaviors in respective to products they are using and how other related competitors are performing in the market. This will also help any company to find the right buyer for their products.

This sounds like a very sound investment in a great idea that, if well implemented, could really accelerate the growth of IoT over the coming years. I am particularly impressed by the inclusive approach that has been adopted by Cisco, bringing in many partners to aid in the development of the data centers. This direction implies that there will be practically no limit to the specific number of data centers adding even more elasticity and scalability in the entire cloud service.

The whole premise here is very odd: why would Cisco's datacenters appeal to IoT vendors any more than competing cloud providers? What's Cisco's unique value-add? If the nature of all current "webscale" IT is anything to go by, vendors will either want generic, non-locked-in cloud access, or else handle it themselves. Cisco *could* play in the generic, non-locked-in space, but that's not exactly in their DNA.

Fundamentally, this is all premised on customer ignorance and/or bliss. Eventually the customer is going to wake up and be utterly creeped out by vendors who want their IoT data for commercial purposes. After all, I'm not going to help you make money off me unless you're providing a LOT of compensatory value. And the history of cloud is that that those recompensatory services become extremely cheap (consider the value of email services these days, or file storage.) Gmail has a first-mover advantage, but as cloud email further becomes the norm, it's cost-to-provide is also shrinking fast, so why wouldn't I switch to another service that gives me better privacy?

Fungibility of cloud services works against "premium" suppliers like Cisco, I'm afraid.

There are a few government agencies that are interested in this data as well. The race is on to see who is going to be the top Big Brother.

The real gold to be mined here is in cross-correlation of datasets. I would expect that corporations will at first tend to silo the data that they collect from the IoT sensors that they produce. I would hope, on the other hand, that government and research organizations will make their datasets more widely available. At some point we will begin hitting critical mass points to begin doing very interesting things in terms of big data analysis.

This is becoming intersting. Every one wants data to be on their cloud. There is a lot more money that can be garnered by the cloud companies based on anbalytics that are done on this data which would suggest what products the customer are using and how much time they are using. Any company would be interested to buy this data to find a right customer for their products or to understand what is the right product fot the customers who are using their competeitor products.